RE: Do what?!?

["Bawn, Loren" <LBAWN@dhs.state.ia.us>]

In trying to put both the worst and the best interpretation on the language
Roger Key sent around, I tried to rephrase each sentence of the paragraph to
see if it might be possible that the organization in question may be just
suffering from puffed up writing rather than actually trying to hide
something.  Here's what I came up with:

Sentence 1: ". . . is a world class operation with fanatical culture of
continuous process improvement."

Positive-We understand our system, and we continue to improve it to provide
measurable increased value to our customers.
Negative-We're constantly tampering. 

Sentence 2: "We are a metric-driven organization, with (sic) performance
scorecards link corporate strategy and operational performance to individual
compensation."

Positive???-We're measuring the wrong things, and misusing the results, but
at least we're measuring.
Negative-We have some creative ways to blame the workers when things go
wrong.

Sentence 3: "Statistical process control assures continuous process
improvement and cascading operational metric reviews assure awareness,
alignment and visibility to operational performance."

Positive-Measures that are meaningful and useful on the shop floor roll up
logically to measures at the enterprise level.  We work hard to improve
alignment up and down the chain of command.
Negative-Blame, like excrement, flows downhill.

Since I can think of no way to cast sentence 2 in truly positive terms, I
would conclude that the organization is attempting to use quality
terminology to hide something, and not doing a very good job of it.  

Keep the Faith,
Loren Bawn
Executive Officer for Community Systems
Iowa Department of Human Services